Facebook Takes On Twitter With New Notify App For iPhone

It seems Facebook has ambitions beyond remaining the world’s biggest social network. After expanding its social horizons with the acquisition of big names such as Instagram and WhatsApp, the company seems to be shifting its gaze to completely new areas, like virtual assistants, and now, proactive news, most likely with an aim to become an all-in-one portal for all our internet needs.

After the recent launch of Facebook M, a digital assistant that can hold its own against the likes of Siri, Google Now and Cortana, and a Google Now-inspired redesign of the notifications area in its mobile apps, it was rumored that the social media giant was working on an app with which it plans to take on Twitter the social media giant Recently, there were rumors of a news app in development with which the social media giant plans to take on Twitter. That app was released earlier today, and it’s called Notify.

Available for free on iPhone today, Facebook’s Notify is a simple news curator that pushes notifications from your favorite news sources, allowing you to stay abreast with the latest from the topics that interest you. It links up with your Facebook account to provide you with a myriad of websites and online publications, or “Stations”, covering a variety of topics and uses your location (with your permission, of course) to notify you of breaking news, weather updates and deals in your area.

Notify’s purpose is to push content to your device in rel-time, saving you the trouble of browsing through a feed of mixed content to get your daily news fix. The notifications, like all others, will be pushed right to your lock screen, after which you can opt to view the underlying content or save it for later. Within the app, all updates from your chosen sources are displayed in one collective chronological field that looks a lot like Twitter’s.

It’s a pretty straightforward concept quite similar to the aforementioned notification area revamp currently in the process of being rolled out to Facebook for Android and iOS, one that could have easily been incorporated into the Facebook app but wasn’t, most likely to avoid cluttering it up any further.

The app is only available on the US App Store as of this writing, and there is no indication when it’ll be released to other regions or as to whether an Android app is in the pipeline.

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